Saturday, August 5, 2017

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Everything you've ever heard about chastity belts is a lie.
• Joys and sorrows: Lewis Hine at Ellis Island.
• Sketches from a journey across Europe in 1817.
• So how many miles in a month did the old wool spinners cover with a walking wheel?
• The truth about John Quincy Adams' skinny-dipping and reporter Anne Royall.
• Did the invention of the sewing machine mean liberation or drudgery for 19thc women?
• Image: Witnesses: three chestnut trees at Hougoumont bear musket ball scars that prove they were there in 1815.
• On-line exhibition: Victorian Valentines: Intimacy in the Industrial Age.
• Mapping Dante's Inferno, one circle of hell at a time.
• America's first woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell.
• Image: Navigate your way around the Roman city of Londinium c AD50 with this interactive map.
• Fashion's attics: in Italy, designers maintain their own archives both for preservation and inspiration.
• "Picturing Places", a new online resource from the British Library, helps to visualize the Georgian past with images from their collection.
• Benjamin Franklin's London.
• Image: Medieval Italian colored glass drinking horns.
• What Shakespeare's house looked like in 1737.
• The lost young love of John Quincy Adams.
• Did Jane Austen develop cataracts from arsenic poisoning?
• Over 120 years later, this garden of glass flowers is still blooming.
• Image: Just for fun - the cover of Enlightened Bride magazine.Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection

Share This

A Polite Explanation

There’s a big difference in how we use history. But we’re equally nuts about it. To us, the everyday details of life in the past are things to talk about, ponder, make fun of -- much in the way normal people talk about their favorite reality show.

We talk about who’s wearing what and who’s sleeping with whom. We try to sort out rumor or myth from fact. We thought there must be at least three other people out there who think history’s fascinating and fun, too. This blog is for them.